In 1984 the government allowed developers to create services for the Minitel. The government took a 30% cut and passed the rest on to developers (sound familiar?) creating the world's first app store. From a user's perspective using apps on the Minitel was frictionless - you were just billed for what you used through your phone bill.

[...]

How big was this app store? In the nineties it was pulling in over a billion USD a year! This is an astronomical sum when you consider France's population size. Though the crossover point is near, the Minitel in its lifetime paid out more to developers than Apple has to iOS developers to date. Companies would advertise their apps in the subway, on highway billboards, and on television.

Amazing. This could very well be the first application store, something many people think is a new phenomenon invented by Apple.

Steve Jobs is having to explain to the audience how the navigation on it worked, because there hadn't been a phone like it before. And pretty much every smartphone to come after it worked the same way.

Am I saying that the iPhone is currently the best smartphone on the market, or that they haven't ripped from other phones since? No. Just that it was a game changer when it came out. iPad was the same way in regard to tablets.

Iphone wasn't first smartphone that worked. It was first smartphone that was simply used by people. I have Palm Centro somewhere in the shelves. Nice Phone, lot of apps, including games, spreadheets, ebook readers, lauchers, etc... And, just like Windows Mobile and Symbian, it felt like the Amiga of smartphones. It worked and it worked well, but required you to know how to handle RAM usage by apps, repair reset loops, clearing sys directories after uninstalling unwanted aplications and synchronize trough some non-intuitive desktop apps (especially on Linux). Remember all kickstart upgrades, huge disk controllers or additional ram on the left side of A500, or constant incompatibilities both in software and hardware? That's somewhat like smartphones before Apple did iphone.

Steve Jobs is having to explain to the audience how the navigation on it worked, because there hadn't been a phone like it before. And pretty much every smartphone to come after it worked the same way.

Seeing someone willingly using Jobs's reality distortion field, as the basis for an argument, has to be the saddest line of reasoning I have read in this site in a loooong time.

"
Steve Jobs is having to explain to the audience how the navigation on it worked, because there hadn't been a phone like it before. And pretty much every smartphone to come after it worked the same way.

Seeing someone willingly using Jobs's reality distortion field, as the basis for an argument, has to be the saddest line of reasoning I have read in this site in a loooong time. "

No, he is saying that at that time, what the iPhone was doing was pretty unique. No other phone had multitouch, and none had a browser anywhere near as good as that on the iPhone. None certainly had a music player as good as the iPhone, or just in general worked nearly as well.

I mean heck, even Bill Gates said about the iPhone when it first came out "Oh my God, Microsoft didn't aim high enough".

It's easy after 6 years to forget that smartphones really looked like Blackberries before the iPhone was released. Or to put it another way, try picturing a smartphone before the iPhone. Your choices were Blackberries, Windows Mobile devices (I had one) and Palms and Symbian devices. Now, try to remember what they all looked like.

So yes, the GP post is right. Interface-wise, all smartphones now are heavily influenced by the original iPhone.